The Faith of the Vengeful Dead
[My memory has returned.]
Abe glided down in front of me and settled there, his gaze fixed on the black stone.
[This is an Ilbaekgu-cheondo stone, is it not?]
"Uh, yeah."
At my answer, Abe sank down where he was and clutched his head with both hands. It looked as though he was straining to recover the memories that had been scattered when Cho Eunsun's blow sent him flying.
I waited quietly until Abe found the words to begin.
After a long while, he lifted his head toward me, the rims of his eyes reddened.
[I remember now why I rebuked Cho Eunsun so harshly and treated her so coldly. It was because of the Ilbaekgu-cheondo.]
I curled my fingers around the black stone resting in my palm, then opened them again, and asked, "What on earth can you even do with these rocks?"
[She believed she could become a god.]
"What?"
[Cho Eunsun...]
Abe forced the words out with difficulty.
[She believed in the faith of the onryou — the vengeful spirits. The belief that ten thousand wrongfully slain souls can accomplish anything, and that with a hundred thousand of them gathered, one becomes a god.]
"That's insane."
[Exactly. Cho Eunsun is insane. She was determined to harvest vengeful spirits because she believed they could be used to accomplish anything she desired.]
The faith of the vengeful dead.
It was a belief that sprang from the conviction that souls who died nursing grudges would unleash calamities upon the living. Especially powerful, they said, were the spirits of aristocrats who had been politically oppressed or driven to their deaths as traitors.
When a scholar framed by false accusations died, or a general was executed after a failed rebellion — and then a plague swept through the land, or lightning struck and set the mountains ablaze, or nobles began dropping dead of inexplicable illnesses —
people believed the dead had become tatari-gami: vengeful spirits of calamity. Gods of disaster, in other words.
And in those moments, they would hold rites and festivals to appease the enraged spirits — going so far as to build shrines and enshrine them as gods.
As I listened to Abe, I searched it on my phone, and sure enough, it was all real.
The Gion Matsuri — the great month-long festival held every July at Kyoto's Yasaka Shrine. It had begun as a ritual to appease the god who brought pestilence.
I dug a little deeper, and the evidence backing Abe's words came pouring out one after another.
Sugawara no Michizane (845–903). Framed by a political rival and exiled to Dazaifu, where he died — and afterward, lightning strikes, epidemics, and the deaths of nobles plagued Kyoto one after another. To appease his vengeful spirit, Kitano Tenmangu was erected and he was enshrined as Tenjin-sama. In later years, he came to be worshipped as the god of learning.
Then there was Taira no Masakado, who proclaimed himself the "New Emperor" and raised a rebellion, only to be crushed within two months. When pestilence ran rampant after his death, the Kanda Myojin shrine was built to enshrine him. The burial mound of Masakado's severed head still stands, untouched, in the very heart of Tokyo's forest of skyscrapers.
After the Great Kanto Earthquake, when the government tried to excavate and demolish the head mound to build a temporary office building, fourteen officials and construction staff died one after another in various accidents. The government never touched the mound again. Even during the Otemachi redevelopment for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, the head mound was left exactly where it was.
[There are those who interpret the practice as a means of purifying vengeful souls into benevolence,] Abe said. [But there were also those who misinterpreted it to mean that a human being can become a god.]
"Becoming a god through vengeful spirits?"
[Yes. A tatari-gami — a god of calamity — is, in the end, still a god.]
A thought occurred to me all at once.
The difference between religion and superstition is whether it benefits humanity or harms it — or so they say. Cho Eunsun, it seemed, was no religious believer but a devotee of superstition, who had studied only the methods that harmed people.
Abe continued, and his words matched my thoughts exactly.
[When I learned that Cho Eunsun intended to use souls burdened with grudges, I was so furious that I rebuked her severely. I told her I would teach her no more of the mystic arts.]
"As if she were someone who'd stop just because you said so."
[You are right, my lord. Cho Eunsun only sank deeper into the faith of the vengeful dead. And then she discovered that a Transcendental Spirit Medium existed — one who could open the gates of the underworld.]
And that would be me.
So that was why, back when Abe and I were in communion, Cho Eunsun had spouted all those bone-chilling things — about wanting to learn about my power, about admiring me, even about loving me.
[The Ilbaekgu-cheondo. She wants to gather and gather the traces left behind by the vengeful souls ferried to the afterlife, until she has forged a hundred thousand of them.]
"So since no shaman, however powerful, could ever round up a hundred thousand vengeful spirits, she's collecting the stones instead and working her curses through them?"
[Yes. That is so.]
Abe had died more than thirty years ago.
Even back then, he had known of the Transcendental Spirit Medium who opened the gates of the underworld, and of the Ilbaekgu-cheondo stones.
So there were Transcendental Spirit Mediators before me, apparently more than a few of them.
Grandpa Hosik had picked one of these stones up on Front Mountain, too. That gently swelling mound of earth must have been a grave — which meant that someone with abilities much like mine must have lived a very, very long time ago, and been buried there.
"Who do you suppose it was?"
[Pardon?]
"The Transcendental Spirit Medium buried in Front Mountain."
[If you search the historical records, might you not find out?]
"Yeah. I think I'll have to look into it."
I nodded, then said to Abe, "Abe — the fact that you recognized this stone means you saw Ilbaekgu-cheondo stones when you were alive, doesn't it."
[I saw the collection Cho Eunsun had assembled. She had gathered six in total.]
"How many more has she collected in thirty years, I wonder."
The Ilbaekgu-cheondo — stones engraved with the traces of souls already dead and ferried to the afterlife.
And Cho Eunsun, who meant to harvest those engravings and work them into her curses.
She carried lesser gods clinging to her body — still alive, technically, but half of her had already become something like a ghost.
She wants to become a god of calamity?
A shiver crawled up my spine before I could stop it, and my whole body trembled.
"What do you mean, what happened?"
Cho Eunsun scrunched her brow in irritation at the report that most of the plots in the Ugok 5-ri auction had been postponed over the road construction site.
"The county governor filed an objection personally, and they're conducting a resurvey. Five plots did go to auction, including the Chinese restaurant building, but..."
When her secretary's voice trailed off, a murderous glint kindled in Cho Eunsun's eyes.
"But?"
"Son Guchul failed to win the bid, ma'am."
Losing an auction — that was what they called being struck down at the hammer.
Flabbergasted, Cho Eunsun turned frigid eyes on her secretary. "So someone else won it?"
"Yes. According to Son Guchul, some young fellow who moved to the countryside bought it."
The Chinese restaurant building and the land around it were the yolk in the middle of Ugok 5-ri's egg. The plots sat flush against a two-lane road, on flat ground facing south, with a clear view of the Pyeongcheong River.
If the villagers had sold up and relocated without a fuss, the expressway would have been routed that way. The dead man Jeong Hyeon-taek had wanted exactly that, but the residents' resistance had been so fierce that the highway's path had been bent elsewhere.
"Find out who bought it."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And shut Son Guchul's mouth — properly. Including the matter of the loan I promised him. He doesn't breathe a word of any of it."
"Understood, ma'am."
The moment her secretary left the room, Cho Eunsun rose from her seat and walked into the next chamber.
The inner office was lavishly appointed, with a bed and a private bath. And at the far end of it stood her shrine room.
Cho Eunsun narrowed her eyes as she gazed at the three thousand Ilbaekgu-cheondo stones adorning the shrine room's walls.
Collecting those, one by one, took me more than thirty years.
And yet there existed a Transcendental Spirit Medium, one who had awakened Abe's soul and now held him in thrall.
With that medium's help, only seven thousand more stones stood between her and becoming a living tatari-gami — a god of calamity made flesh.
Merely take the Transcendental Spirit Medium to a cemetery, and Ilbaekgu-cheondo stones would come, several in a single day.
I must make Abe come back to me. Only then can I reach that medium again.
An obsessive, burning fixation began to fill Cho Eunsun's eyes.
The next day, I went to see Choi Hogyeong at Yeon-du in Ugok 3-ri. She'd called to say she'd finished the website design for Ugok's Yard, along with the promotional images for social media.
Choi Hogyeong had majored in art, agonized over how to make a living from it, and studied web design — only to end up choosing farming as her profession. She ran the natural dyeing workshop on the side, but of the twenty-four hours in her day, the lion's share went into the fields.
Well, I hunt for treasure and ferry souls to the afterlife too, but my job is farmer all the same.
I pulled up tight against the stone wall of Hogyeong's house and stepped into the yard.
And there was Park Seoktae, greeting me.
"Yoonho! Welcome, welcome. It's been ages!"
Seoktae's face was burnt pitch-black, as if he'd taken a direct hit from the UV rays. One look at him and you could tell he'd worked the fields harder than any of us.
"Seoktae, good to see you. You're here to see your best buddy, I take it."
"Nope. I heard you were coming and sprinted right over. There's something I need to ask you."
"Me?"
"Yes, you."
Seoktae hauled me over to sit on the flat picnic platform, then blurted it out without preamble.
"You're entering the Pyeongcheong Marathon, right? I've been assuming you would, obviously, but I figured I'd ask and make sure."
"The Pyeongcheong Marathon?"
Back when I'd been tramping in and out of the county office sorting out permits for my coffee roasting workshop, I had noticed a banner hanging there.
Run Through Beautiful Pyeongcheong!
But that was all — my eyes had passed over the words, nothing more. It had never once crossed my mind to enter a marathon.
"Nope. Never considered it."
"Wh-what, really? That's so strange?"
"Huh? What is?"
"Everyone from our farming school class just assumes you'll be running. They're even making cheering placards for you."
"Why on earth would they think that?"
As I blinked at him in bewilderment, Seoktae answered, "Because you're the Pyeongcheong County goodwill ambassador and the youth representative of Ugok 1-ri, that's why."
"I am the goodwill ambassador, sure, but the youth representative of Ugok 1-ri..."
Honestly, I couldn't exactly deny it. In our village, the only people young enough to count were me, Chai, and Bang Jeongsoo.
Except Chai was a Thai national, and Jeongsoo was less a youth representative than a middle-aged representative. So in the end, the village's youth representative was still just one man: me.
Seoktae pressed on. "The winner's prize this year is a million won. And it's not just the individual race — there's a team event too, with a three-million-won purse. Hogyeong and I are planning to enter as a team."
From what I heard, the team event was an award given to any group of three who finished the whole course together. Teams could be formed around a village, a club, a workplace, even a hobby group. The whole point was simply to get one more person out there enjoying the run.
Seoktae's voice rose with excitement. "The county's planning to promote the thing big time. They're inviting trot singers, even some has-been girl group."
"A has-been girl group..."
"Well, it won't be BlackRose or anything, haha."
Seoktae beamed at me. "So if you weren't planning on the individual race — how about running the team event with us? That's what I wanted to ask."
"Oh, come on. Don't be ridiculous."
Choi Hogyeong came out carrying a tray of drinks, snickering. "Yoonho would show up as the representative of Ugok 1-ri no matter what happened. Isn't that right?"
"Huh?"
No, seriously, I haven't given the marathon a single thought?
"You were not just the Ugok 1-ri representative, you were the class president at farming school, remember? So come on, class president — run with us!"
"Aw, come off it. Yoonho wants to run as the Ugok 1-ri rep and take the crown. He's got a village to promote, after all."
"Everyone already knows the county goodwill ambassador lives in Ugok 1-ri. What more is there to promote? Am I wrong, Yoonho?"
Seoktae was clearly determined to drag me into the team event by any means necessary.
Hogyeong waved her hands as if to say, ease up on him, and set a cup of misutgaru down in front of me, ice cubes clinking against the sides.
"Here, drink this. And don't worry about us — just blow us off. We graduated from farming school; what tribal loyalty do we owe each other? Right?"
"Hahaha. Blow you off? Look, I honestly haven't thought about the marathon for even the length of the letter m —"
The moment I said it with a laugh, Hogyeong and Seoktae leaned in close, dead serious.
"Then start thinking about it right now."
"Exactly. From this very second, mull it over every waking moment. Three million won, Yoonho. That's the team prize."
"We're the youngest people in all of Pyeongcheong County! This is the universe practically begging us to take its money!"
"Yoonho, pleeease..."
Hogyeong and Seoktae stared at me, their eyes sparkling like a pair of pleading puppies.